A new biography of the seminal twentieth-century historian and
thinker who pioneered the study of Jewish mysticism and
profoundly influenced the Zionist movement
Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) was perhaps the foremost Jewish
intellectual of the twentieth century. Pioneering the study of
Jewish mysticism as a legitimate academic discipline, he
overturned the rationalist bias of his predecessors and revealed
an extraordinary world of... more...

Enlightenment and Secularism is a collection of
twenty eight essays that seek to understand the connection between
the European Enlightenment and the emergence of secular societies,
as well as the character or nature of those societies. The
contributors are drawn from a variety of disciplines including
History, Sociology, Political Science, and Literature. Most of the
essays focus on a single text from the Enlightenment, borrowing or
secularizing the... more...

The first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement that
shaped modern Judaism
This is the first comprehensive history of the pietistic movement
that shaped modern Judaism. The book’s unique blend of
intellectual, religious, and social history offers perspectives
on the movement’s leaders as well as its followers, and
demonstrates that, far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages,
Hasidism is a product of modernity that... more...

Not in the Heavens traces the rise of Jewish secularism
through the visionary writers and thinkers who led its
development. Spanning the rich history of Judaism from the Bible
to today, David Biale shows how the secular tradition these
visionaries created is a uniquely Jewish one, and how the
emergence of Jewish secularism was not merely a response to
modernity but arose from forces long at play within Judaism
itself.
Biale... more...

WITH MORE THAN 100 BLACK-AND-WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT
Who are “the Jews”? Scattered over much of the world throughout
most of their three-thousand-year-old history, are they one people
or many? How do they resemble and how do they differ from Jews in
other places and times? What have their relationships been to the
cultures of their neighbors?
To address these and similar questions, twenty-three of the finest
scholars of our... more...